The Online Photographer : Is the Fanboy Era Ending?

Expressing enthusiasm for photography by way of brand fanaticism seems to be something that’s receding in the rearview mirror now. I wasn’t really aware of it existing—well, except among Leica fans—much before the 1990s. There were certainly aficionados of brands, mainly I think because you had to accumulate equipment and mostly people did it within one brand, or at least one brand per format—but most people weren’t partisans. I blamed the onset of “fanboyism” (I always disliked the term, because it was a putdown) in part on the decision by CompuServe to divide its photoforums by brand—initially they weren’t organized that way. (I wish I knew when that happened. Sometime in the mid-1990s maybe?)

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